John Lott's Website

Welcome! Follow me on twitter at @johnrlottjr or at https://crimeresearch.org. Please e-mail questions to johnrlott@crimeresearch.org.

6/03/2016

So the Federal Government requires that you have to have one of three types of photo IDs to use PayPal, but you don't need an ID to vote

PayPal is requiring this photo ID because of federal regulations. Even the states that have photo voter ID regulations aren't this restrictive in limiting you to so few types of IDs. Yet, the Federal government has no problem requiring this to use PayPal. Presumably the government is worried about people trying to cheat the government out of tax revenue. So why isn't the government equally worried about vote fraud?

Last Friday at the NRA convention, Donald Trump forcefully repeated his challenge to Hillary Clinton on guns: “As I said before, she wants to abolish the Second Amendment. She wants to take your guns away. She wants to abolish — just remember that. … If she gets to appoint her judges, she will abolish the Second Amendment.”

CNN noted: “Clinton, who swiftly rebutted Trump’s remarks, has called for universal background checks and stricter controls on firearms, but has never called for the abolition of the 2nd Amendment. In fact, on her website, she calls gun ownership ‘part of the fabric of many law-abiding communities.’” Politifact asserted: “We found no evidence of Clinton ever saying verbatim or suggesting explicitly that she wants to abolish the Second Amendment, and the bulk of Clinton’s comments suggest the opposite. She has repeatedly said she wants to protect the right to bear arms while enacting measures to prevent gun violence.”

But these are the same organizations that assured people that their concerns about Obama on guns were wrong. In 2008, FactCheck.org asserted that there was no evidence that Obama would “appoint Judges to the U.S. Supreme Court and Federal Judiciary Who Share His Views on the Second Amendment.” Obama “always believed that the Second Amendment protects the right of individuals to bear arms,” the website concluded.

5/29/2016

I debated Baz Dreisinger from the John Jay College of Criminal Justice appeared on Turkish TRT World's The Newsmakers to debate whether prison deters crime and whether prison should be abolished (Thursday, May 26, 2016).